Journal entries for May, 2006

I made the switch over to the new server today. Did you notice? I hope you didn't.

On Will Byrd's recommendation, I bought dedicated server hosting at ServerBeach about a week ago. I settled for one of the cheapest options, paying $159/month for an Athlon 2600 server with two 80 GB EIDE drives and 1 GB of RAM, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. $159 is a lot of money, but on the plus side, I now have lots more disk space (old BinRock was perilously close to filling up its single 74 GB disk) and more bandwidth than I'll ever use (this server comes with 2000 GB/month, and BinRock usually uses about 30).

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In Ray Romano's book, Everything And A Kite, he says that, when he's trying to stay awake on long drives, he tries to think up sentences that have never ever been uttered before, such as, "Give me back my fudge suitcase, emperor." I think I may have just found another one.

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I took Andrés and Amy to the airport today. I was sad to see them go, but we made the best of this past week, and had a great time, so at least it doesn't feel like, "WTF, you're leaving already?" On past visits, we've had a tendency to waste the time by sitting around watching TV and movies. And that's certainly fun, but there's enough cool things to do out on the island that it's a shame to let those opportunities go to waste.

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I picked up the Evo from the body shop a week after dropping it off. They did a good job. It's so nice to have the car whole again.

Amy graduated last week, so on Monday night she and Andrés planned to fly down to PR for a two-week visit before going up to Boston to find a place to live. However, their flight out of Chicago was cancelled due to bad weather, and the next flight didn't leave until the next morning, so they had to spend the night there. And apparently, the airline won't give you a hotel room for the night if the flight was cancelled due to weather, so they had to find and pay for one themselves. Fair or unfair? (All) Unfair!

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Indeed, it has been three quarter score days since my last post, and for that I apologize, an accusatory finger pointed towards work. With three or four projects to juggle, I've had none of the little relaxing interludes I've come to cherish so much.

I think I will make a series of smaller, themed posts, rather than one gigantic pile of talking. It's no less work to write or read, but it feels like it. This one will be photographic in nature.

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The camera I've been building for a month and a half is finally done. There's still a few cosmetic things left to do, but functionally, it's complete. In honor of the original, named the Pink Panther, I hereby christen mine the Pink Cow. I'll need to paint a little logo on it somewhere :)

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Since my grandparents are out of the island for a month and I have the use of their cars, I finally have an opportunity to get the damage on the passenger door of my own car fixed. Yesterday I dropped the car off at the body shop. It's kind of exciting to be finally getting it done. The guy said to call on Friday to see if it was ready. I was originally planning on claiming this repair work against my insurance, but it turns out that the cost is just barely above my deductable, so I'm not sure if it's worth it.

The guy was friendly and knowledgeable, which is very reassuring. I've always found it really difficult to find good car repairmen (whatever the specialty) that really know what they're doing. Back in Clemson, I had found a great exhaust shop — Glenn's Muffler Shop, in Seneca. I knew that if I needed anything done related to welding or tubing, they could do it well, cheaply, and with a great helpful attitude. I was sad to give that up when I left the area. This shop seemed to give me that same impression. We'll see how good the results are.